Westworld Season Finale Preview: “The Bicameral Mind”

“These violent delights have violent ends”

Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) in the Westworld season finale. Photo: John P. Johnson/HBO

It was less than two months ago that Westworld first arrived on our screens. In that period, we’ve seen nine episodes, witnessed our favorite characters die a thousand times, and spun more wild theories than we can count anymore. Speculation has developed into hard suspicion, and been confirmed – or debunked. For every question that’s been answered, three more remain, and every fact spawns new questions about this strange world that draws in everyone, hosts and creators alike. It would take seasons to explore all the world-building curiosities and philosophical avenues of Westworld.

But there’s only one episode left this year. So, what’s in store for us in “The Bicameral Mind,” this Sunday’s season finale?

The season one finale is written by series creators Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan and is directed by Nolan.

HBO has also released a promising preview video and four episode photos (including the one above), packed with hints for the finale. If you’re a spoiler-phobe, stop here!

“Stories help us become the people we dreamed of being,” Ford explains as he prepares to unveil his new narrative – but why does something so simple sound sinister? The video promises a tense confrontation between Dolores and her tormentor, the Man in Black (Ed Harris), with the man being dragged into the church. We can also expect to see Maeve making a move to escape Westworld, with the help of a few friends. But will it succeed? Can anyone break free of Westworld?

HBO released four finale images to whet your appetites this week.

In the first, we spy Teddy (James Marsden) with a town full of bodies. In the trailer, Teddy can be seen firing his gun at one man in the town, but is he responsible for the entire massacre, or did he have help?

Photo: John P. Johnson/HBO

In the next photo, Dolores and the Man in Black travel through a cemetery; the belled grave in front ominously reads “Dolores Abernathy.” A morbid touch on the part of the park-builders, a memorial to an earlier version of the host, or is Dolores having mixed-memory visions again?

Photo: John P. Johnson/HBO

The last photo: we see Maeve in the facility with host outlaws Hector (Rodrigo Santoro) and Armistice (Ingrid Bolsø Berdal), and Delos butcher Felix (Leonardo Nam) along for the ride, as usual. The hosts are dressed as human employees; that, combined with their actions in the episode preview, confirms they’re striking back at their creators in a big way in the season finale.

You may also like

With only a few days left until the Westworld finale, it’s time to put our thinking caps on – or our brain scanning Stetsons, if you prefer – and take a deep dive into the “The Passenger” teaser! There is a ton of...

I love this show so much! Every line of dialogue matters. Which got me to think in the earlier episodes, for example Chestnut, when Dolores tells Teddy she forgets he only dresses like a cowboy. She the proceeds to tell him about the Jezebel leading the heard. My religious knowledge is extremely limited, but I know a little bit. Enough to know that Dolores knowing the name Jezebel didn’t fit. We also heard Ford mention Lazarus, and have heard Ford been referred to as God or ‘God Like’ more times than I can keep up with.

So right now I’m thinking Ford is God, Arnold is Lazarus, and Maeve is Jezebel. Although it could be argued that Delores is Jezebel as well. Both fit.

The finale will certainly be interesting. My major question is what exactly is the purpose of Dr. Ford’s new narrative, which he has been setting up since he introduced the “Reveries” code in episode one…

Assuming we’re accepting the premise that The Man in Black is William, I suspect we’ll find out that he’s real reason behind his repeated visits to the park in the last thirty years is that’s he’s been trying to “wake up” Dolores all this time, trying to get her to remember him, and that he thinks the Maze is going to help him accomplish that. In the preview for the episode we see Ed Harris looking at Dolores with a shocked expression in his face; I think this is the moment he finds out that Dolores finally remembers…

That’s what I’m thinking too. The things Felix and Sylvester were up to are too big to stay secret. They must have been caught on camera like that co-worker Elsie confronted a couple of episodes ago. It makes me wonder if what Maeve is doing is somehow part of Ford’s narrative, though of course she doesn’t know it.

Hi all. I’m a season regular at WotW, but have taken a break from the site for the offseason, as I wanted to experience S7 as unsullied as possible.

Then Westworld drops.

Oh my….

I was immediately drawn into the complex and intricate world unveiling in front of us each week. It had my mind asking questions for which my reflections only created newer and deeper questions about consciousness, life, free will. About death.

I look forward to the season finale and what’s to come for the future of westworld. It’s been fun so far…

I also congratulate all those involved in bringing this community to the fans. Like the original watchers site, we are all fans first, gathered to discuss our thoughts, crazy theories or other tidbits of information we manage to get our ever curious hands on. Thank you for bringing us all together!!

I know this may upset many people if its true as it could be viewed as bad writing, but on the basis of your comment regarding Ford playing God and watching in amusement…I have wondered very early on if all of westworld are hosts and that what we are seeing is fords attempt to evolve the human race to the next level. He says the only thing they have yet to achieve is immortality. But to achieve true immortality a being must be conscious of what that is. Essentially the hosts can be rebuilt as needed, so technically they are immortal. But Ford must first find a way for the hosts to gain sentience. Every host is based on their human counterpart (which may be what is up with Delos…why their interest is so high. Think of those possibilities.)

One thing that sticks out is when Charlotte fires Bernard and that whole kind of chaotic scene occurs. Watch as Ford is just watching. Smiling. Watching as his test subjects react to these real world situations. He just smiles.

He thinks there are actually four timelines. The WW reactions are much shorter than the GOT reactions. I’m not home right now, or I’d go into more detail. Here is the link if you’re interested in checking it out:

Timeline 1: Before the big incident in the park 30 years ago. Dolores meeting with human Arnold. She’s wearing the blue dress and walking in the church filled with the other malfunctioning hosts. It makes me wonder if the maze was some sort of test. The hosts might not have seen the door from the confessional just like Bernard didn’t see the door Theresa pointed out.

Timeline 2: Dolores’ adventures with Billy and Logan. She wears the dress first and then changes into the other outfit. I can’t remember if human Arnold is dead in this timeline.

Timeline 3: Dolores and the MIB. She travels alone to the church wearing the second outfit from timeline 2 and the lab is destroyed. I think they had her wear the same thing to make things purposely vague.

I think these 3 timelines are certain.

And there are possibly more timelines every time she has a vision of herself (when she’s with Logan and she sees herself dead in the river could be a timeline between 1 and 2). I feel like the show implies Arnold and her play the ‘maze game’ on a regular basis and that she doesn’t always manage to get to him because she gets killed on the way, or is brought back by a staff member because she’s strayed too far from her loop (like when she’s with William in that village and that other guy tries to bring her with him).

Hi everyone from other Watchers *waves madly in all directions*.
Just wanted to say hello really and let you know that here in the UK we don’t get the show until tuesday evening so you can feel sorry for me. Although being the spoiler lover I am, I’ll be on here once it’s finished to see what you all think about it. The biggest surprise for me will be if William and/or Dolores don’t at least try to kill Logan this week. That guy is soooo punchable!

I like the way you’ve done the comment layout so it’s much easier to follow conversations over here.

1) Ford is behind Maeve’s awakening, and will backdoor them like with Clementine after they escape in order to have control over a robot army to take over the world outside (most reasonable one)

2) The bot in Ford’s basement is for himself – it’s the super user bot that will be able to control other bots.He will abandon his human body and become a God.

3) Arnold is actually in the park somewhere.Maybe inside a host he made for himself.The last step in “transferring himself” to his new body was to have Delores kill his flesh body.

4) The man in black thinks that the maze will allow himself to become an android so he can be with Delores.

1. I agree that there’s no way that Dr Ford doesn’t know about Maeve, Felix and Sylvester…for all I know this may be a secret part of his “new narrative”

2.Hmmm…don’t know about this.

3. This is certainly possible; moreover, we know from Dr Ford’s “Analysis Mode” conversation with Dolores in episode five that Dr Ford’s clearly suspects that a “part” of Arnold maybe hidden in the park…or maybe within Dolores’ consciousness? (Which he calls the “Walled Garden”)

4. I too think that Willia…ehem the Man in Black thinks that the Maze will allow him to be with Dolores in some way, shape or form.

I was just about to tell you something I read and realised I have no idea what we do about spoilers (or potential ones) on here? I haven’t fully explored the site yet, am I missing some instructions somewhere? Just in case I won’t say anything, except my boot is poised to smash through the screen into his smug face the second he says anything remotely Loganish.

Oh and squuueeeeeeee!! just read that Sky Atlantic are showing ep 10 simultaneously with the USA, rather than the 43 hour delay we’ve had for the last 9 episodes, and I’m working from home on monday so can watch it live at 2am and not have to get up after nowhere near enough sleep. YAY!

So we discovered Ford has written a backdoor code into all the hosts last episode… my question is: Doesn’t Maeve have access to that same backdoor? It sure seems like it- Ford narrated Bernard’s next actions to him to make him commit suicide- just like Maeve manipulated the hosts in Sweetwater by narrating their next actions to them in the previous episode. Ford’s not going to be able to take her down if this is true… right?

2. Probably a stretch. I didn’t read the casting spoilers so if it’s Hopkins who is staying on then it’s not happening I guess. 🙂

3. Honestly I just really want to have Jeffery Wright back next season so I’m trying to find a way for it to happen. Having him as Arnold rather than Bernard would be awesome, IMO. But if he’s “alive” only as part of his code I guess that’s ok. I suppose he could keep doing voiceovers.

4. I am excited to see what happens though I’m afraid it’s all going to be a trap by Ford, somehow.

I figured that the “incident” is the massacre that occurred in the original town where Delores ultimately kills Arnold (where we saw the hosts dancing last episode). But, that would have occurred a couple years before Logan/William. The town is already buried in the sand by the time William and Delores arrive.

I think narration and the backdoor are different. Many characters use Narration as commands to control the hosts – Stubbs, Elsie, Bernard, Ford, Maeve, etc. Clearly they don’t all have the same administrative privileges. Bernard obviously was able to control Clem but that didn’t stop Ford from controlling Bernard.

If I’m correct and Ford is behind Maeve’s awakening (directly or indirectly) then he would have ensured that while she has plenty of admin power over other hosts, that he would still have ultimate control over her.

Susan Miller,
Thanks for the clarification, Sue 🙂 As someone who can never be too spoiled and reads all of them I’ve been so used to being really careful not to spoil things for others on Watchers. It’s gonna be really strange having no original source material to go on. World of the truly unsullied, here we come!

Ok, this is the first time I have come online to a Westworld fan page and my head is literally spinning with the theories I am reading about lol.

I have absolutely no idea why people think William is the MIB, I must have missed something, but i take it from the comments that William and Logan happened in a different timeline. I missed this too….sigh .

I’ve been following on Reddit so far and was liking some of the main theories on William and Logan there, but read something yesterday which has potentially blown a hole in them and so now I am back to floundering cluelessly. I’m repeating them below so don’t read on if you don’t want to know.

THEORIES/POTENTIAL SPOILERS FOR WILLIAM AND LOGAN
Most of what we are seeing is in the present. However, W&L’s storyline is from approx 30 years ago. L’s wealthy, powerful family company were going to save an ailing Westworld and W, a middle management type in the company, was due to marry L’s sister Juliet, but fell in love with Dolores. *wavy line time passing effect* The MiB, in the present day, is W now. He now seems to have the power in the company that was L’s family’s. Best guess: something (likely death) happened to L in the park. W marries J in remorse for L’s fate and rises up the ranks of the company who now own/control Westworld. So far so good, this all seems quite plausible.

The bit which melted my brain yesterday was to do with the photo that Peter Abernathy (D’s father) found in ep1, which caused his meltdown. When we see him picking it out of the earth you can only see the top right hand corner, which looks like it might be the golden gate bridge in daylight. The photo he shows D is a completely different one, the same one that L sticks in W’s pocket, apparently showing J in a totally different location. (Someone suggested the photo of J might be in L’s grave.) The two different photos have been confirmed to not be a continuity error. Still, so far so good….

Then yesterday I saw that the photo of J is a Getty image stock photo from our real world, not one taken for the show. I’ve been assuming all along that the guests are (almost certainly) all human, but now have the possibility that W and/or L are hosts who think they are human and J doesn’t exist. Now we are back to the idea that potentially everyone is a host and no-one we have seen is human, although they may be based on (now dead) real people.

TL;DR: I need a Maeve style upgrade in understanding and processing power to work out what’s going on and have given up guessing. And I though there were lots of possibilities in GoT!

This is going to be such fun! I love Watchers for exposing me to rich character and plot analysis, and boy, I sure could use some of the same for Westworld. My hope, more of these characters come alive for me. Because I enjoy the show, but the only characters I really care about so far are Maeve, and Teddy. My wish for the finale- Teddy gets a tune up.

You know all the theories we have about GoT? There are hundreds and they all exist within the framework provide by the show and books with a huge amount of helpful information. Multiply that by infinity for Westworld, it’s unbelievable! There are far too many of them to go in to here but there is an awful lot of information in the background of scenes which people are spotting, it’s very subtle though, definitely not the sort of thing you’d notice much of on normal viewing.

I think the main thing is that most of what we are seeing is from the hosts’ perspective and, as they are programmed to see (or not see) certain things differently from humans, and experience past events as clearly as things happening now, their pov is not entirely reliable. Best guess is that we are witnessing events over at 35ish year period, most of which is in the present, but not seeing it in strictly chronological order.

I don’t think anyone can work it all out by themselves, there’s far too much going on, so no-one should feel bad for missing stuff.

We only see a corner of the photo that Peter digs out of the dirt. I’m not ready to commit to anything because of that. The one he is looking at later and the one that Logan has are the same. I could be wrong – I usually am – but I think that’s all we need to know.

If I can ask – why does the use of a stock photo imply that all humans are hosts? i just assumed it meant that we would never see young Juliet.

mariamb,
Sorry I typed “we” when I meant “I”. I was conscious of writing too much and trying to keep it minimal – it’s relative term! 😉 so didn’t really explain myself.

This is going to get very complicated so I’m going to say for sake of argument that most of what happens in WW is the present (for the show) and W&L are exactly 30 years earlier. Apparently the show is supposed to be set at some point later this century. If it’s Earth then we and the show exist in the same universe and everything we are seeing is supposed to be in our future, but can be either the past or present, or both, for people in the show. If we guess the “present” in the show is 2080, then W&L are in 2050 and we are obviously 2016, as is photo girl (PG). Elsie is in 2080, we, PG and W&L are her past. W&L are in 2050, Elsie is their future and we and PG are in their past.

If PG turns up in 2050 exactly the same as she is now, she is a host version of PG from 2016. Like Bernard and Arnold. W&L both seem to think she is a real person from their world outside the park, but she can’t be real if she is doesn’t age in 34 or so years. If she is a host then obviously either W or L or both of them could also be.

If the WW universe is not the same one as ours (the way GoT isn’t) then PG, a real person from our universe, cannot exist as a real person in another universe.

Either way, in my tiny, cold-addled brain, unless we are talking time travel, multiple dimensions etc – in which case we might as well give up on all theories and go home – if a real person (PG) from 2016 turns up unchanged in the future, or another universe, they can’t be the actual real person from 2016.

It’s at this point my brain melts and, when I’m feeling overwhelmed by the number of theories, I just say to myself “everyone’s a host, problem solved”. So the last sentence of my penultimate para should have said “Now I’m back to the idea…..”

Thanks for every one of your hard work on this site. Kate really likes carrying out research and it’s really easy to understand why. A lot of people hear all regarding the powerful medium you produce powerful secrets on your web site and therefore attract contribution from other individuals about this concern and our own simple princess is in fact becoming educated a lot. Take advantage of the remaining portion of the year. You are always carrying out a terrific job.